I keep a note titled Daily Execution in Evernote. Every morning, I review my Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly note to check what’s in the calendar for the day ahead of me. I look for things that have to happen at a set time (such as a meeting) as well as things that have to happen on this day, but not at a specific time.

This is a template of what my Daily Execution note looks like:

I try not to pollute this note with too much information. If I have a meeting, I create a note for that meeting, put all the details I need in there, and then just add a link to it on my Daily Execution note. If the meeting is a place I have to drive to, I’ll add the address to the note, so I can easily tap on it on my phone and pull up directions. If it’s a phone call, I put the phone number on the note, so I can simply tap on it on my phone.

This note is my single source of truth for my day. It needs to give me a clear idea as to what I need to do on this day, and it needs links to other notes with further information about those things.

I check this note several times all day long.

Many times I’m checking it on my phone, so I try to make it easy to look up information I need.

As the days go by, I jot down quick notes on things I just did. I use vJournal on my Mac or iPhone for that:

vJournal keeps a note in Evernote with timestamps for everything logged that day:

The iOS version of vJournal also adds location information to the note. I like that because sometimes I’m driving by some place and I see something I want to check out later (for instance, a stakepark I didn’t know of). Logging that info to vJournal allows me to easily find out when I saw the place and where it was so I can go back there later.

At the end of the day, I review my Daily Execution note, as well as the note created by vJournal. I verify what I had to do that got done and what didn’t get done, and create new tasks, calendar entries, etc, accordingly.

Once I’m done reviewing that information, a copy all of the content in my Daily Execution note, paste it at the bottom of my note created by vJournal, tag it with “daily log”, rename the note to follow the format YYYY-MM-DD (which allows me to quickly find my log for a specific day), and move the note into a Archive notebook.

For the records, I started using the approach of having a single Daily Execution note about two years ago. The approach of keeping a daily log I’ve started all the way back in 2010 (as of today, I have 2349 notes tagged “daily log”)!!

As far as keeping a daily log like that, I can’t tell you how helpful it has been. I’m often going back to it to help recompose my memory on things I’ve done, people I’ve met, places I’ve been, ideas I’ve had, etc.

I’ve been changing how I do these things slightly over the years, trying new things out, but the basic idea has been sticking around and it works well for me.

I really like the approach presented there and thought I could adapt it to the way I was already organizing things. One part of the approach is to have a note titled “Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly”. See below what that note looks like:

I have a shortcut to that note, as I’m constantly going back to it, often multiple times every day. Even though I have other calendars I need to use (Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, etc), I consider my note in Evernote as my single source of truth: everything that’s really important for me has to be in that note, as it makes very easy for me to see the immediate stuff as well as things that are expected to happen in the future.

Let’s see how that note is organized.

Things that happen every week

In that section I want to see things that happen every week on a specific day. For instance, I need to fill out timesheet on Friday, and I’d like to post to this blog every Tuesday.

Current month

Here I want to see the most important things in the current month. I try not to put to much info in the calendar itself. Instead, I create a separate note for each entry containing all the info I need about it, and then I add a link to that note to the calendar.

Months in the current year

Here I want to see all months in the current year, and things that are expected in those months. Notice that I’ll only put here things for which I know the month, but do not know the actual date (either because it could be any day within that month, or because I don’t really have the actual day yet). When I do have the date, then I move it to another specific place (more on it later).

Things in specific periods

Here’s where I put things I may want to remember in specific periods. For instance, I like doing a monthly review in the first couple of days in the following month. Or, I like remembering that December is a short, unusual month because of the holidays, and I use that information when I’m about to do planning for that month.

Entire current year, day by day

As soon as I know exactly the date for something expected to happen, I put it in this section. It makes very easy for me to see at a glance everything going on the entire year. When I’m planning for a month that’s about to start, I look here to see how the calendar needs to be populated. I also put here birthdays that I absolutely cannot forget.

Five years in the future

This is where I keep things expected for the next five years in the future. If I know the exact date, I’ll add that information, too. It can also be something like “passport expires on Month/Day. Look into getting new one 6 months earlier.”. If I don’t have a date, I’ll at least add a note so I’ll always have a reminder of something important that needs attention.

Beyond

If there’s something I know should happen beyond five years in the future (for instance, an important document that’ll expire and need renewing), then I list it under a Beyond section at the bottom of that note, including the year and note.

Review it often

As I mentioned earlier, I review this note at least once a day. Since I put everything really important in this note and review it often, I get peace of mind knowing I won’t forget these things.

I talked about my struggles integrating AngularJS templates into a Rails app, which boiled down to me skipping a step or two following instructions on how to use the Angular-Rails-Templates gem.

I mentioned Postach.io, which is a blogging platform that allows us to maintain a blog by writing the posts as notes in Evernote. This is what I’m using for my musical blog, Sanctuary of Nevermore.

For my professional blog, www.lassala.net, which is hosted on WordPress, I’ve been using a blogging tool called Blogo, which allows me to write my drafts in Evernote, and then edit the posts and publish it using this tool.

I have the bad habit of starting to read several books and then taking a long time to finish (I just finished a book that I started to read 3 years ago!). I like books both in printed and electronic format. I grab them and start reading. Next thing I know, I’m reading 10 books at the same time.

I decided to organize things so I can finish off the books I’ve started, and put a little more thought into what books I’m going to read next. This is what I do…

Put all books in a single place…

I put all of my digital books in PDF format in a Books notebook in Evernote. This allows to search across all of these books (a feature of Evernote). I also add one note for each print books and audiobooks I have.

Tag them…

I use 4 different tags:

Backlog: used for books I want to read;

To Read: used for books I want to start reading as soon as possible;

Reading: used for books I’ve started to read but haven’t finished yet;

Read: used for books I’m done reading.

Use “Saved Searches”…

I created one “Saved Search” for each one of those tags. It looks like this on my search menu:

I’ve been focusing on my “Books – 2-Reading” search, as I want to finish off those books (there are 11 in the list right now!).

This is how I create each search:

This is how I save the search:

Write book notes…

For each book I’m reading, I create a separate note named after the book’s title, and tag it with “book notes”. I then type in whatever comments I want, put snapshots of specific pages, URLs, anything else related to the book that I find I may need in the future. These notes also go into my Books notebook.

I know I can annotage things on Kindle books and export my notes, but as I mentioned, I have books in Kindle format, PDF, print, audiobooks, so I decided to follow the flow described in this post for any type of book format.

Chocolatey https://chocolatey.org/George’s recommendation of a Machine Package Manager. Since I still do some work on Windows, I’ll check out this tool.

VimiumVimium is a Chrome plugin that adds VIM commands to your web navigation. I’ve been using it for several years now, mostly for the following feature: I hit the F-key, and then Vimium assigns a combination of letters to anything clickable on the page, so I can do all of my web navigation without using the mouse.

ConEmuGeorge mentioned this tool as a etter console for Windows: https://conemu.github.io/I’ll definitely check it out. I’ve been using Console2 for a long time, but ConEmu seems to be a lot better.

Emergent Task PlannerJB’s recommendation for a paper task planner. As much as I like doing everything electronically, I have started using paper for a couple of notes here and there (which I keep syncing it back into Evernote), just in order to try doing things differently. I may try out this task planner and see if it works with my flow.

ElixirJB shared a little of the awesomeness of Elixir’s pattern matching and how you can write some expressive code with it.

When I was running the Virtual Brown Bag (VBB) a few years ago, I used to share weekly links to things I thought interesting or useful. I don’t currently have time to go back at hosting weekly VBBs, but I’ll start posting my links monthly, mostly for my own reference, but it may also turn out to be helpful to my readers.

Funny

Back in 2011 I wrote a post on how I was using Evernote, which is the 2nd most popular post on my blog currently. I guess it was about time for me to write another one, as I continue to use Evernote a lot! Actually, instead of writing another long post, I’ll probably write a couple of short ones…

A few months ago my wife started to produce some great handmade gifts and I wanted an easy way for her to publish, as well as to organize her business. I found out Etsy was a great platform for publishing her items, so we opened her online store called CLVL Arts Brazil, and we are using Evernote to organize her business. It’s worth mentioning she had no idea what Evernote was, but once I showed her how I use it, she started to use it too, and even got a better phone that runs the mobile app more smoothly. As I teach her how to use Evernote and other tools in this business, I plan on writing a series of posts describing our experiences, hoping this will be helpful to somebody else.

I’ll keep updating this one blog post with all the posts in these series, and will also use tags such as “CLVL Arts Brazil”, “Evernote”, etc., so we can find everything around more easily.